Does Hulu support Dolby Atmos?

Best answer: No. Hulu does not support Dolby Atmos as an audio format. (In fact, no live-streaming service in the United States does.)

• With Atmos: Netflix ($15.99 a month)
• Without: Hulu (From $5.99 a month)

Dolby Atmos is way cool, but also cutting edge

We've come a long way from the halcyon days of two-channels stereophonic sound, and there's hardly a shortage of audio standards out there. Most of us are familiar with surround sound, which is usually referred to in terms of 3.1 or 5.1 or 7.1, where the first number refers to the number of front and rear speakers, and the .1 refers to the subwoofer. The new hotness, however, is Dolby Atmos.

Dolby Atmos sort of works the same way, with multiple speakers shooting sound multiple directions. Atmos allows for more discrete "objects," though, and those objects can be pointed toward various places in space. (Or, you know, your living room.) That gives audio engineers more control over what goes where, and it lets sound appear as though it's hanging in space, rather than just coming from a certain direction.

It's pretty incredible. But it also requires additional licensing, greater bandwidth — the source content to be encoded in Atmos in the first place — and for the end consumer to have hardware that's capable of decoding such as signal. And as of right now, Hulu doesn't support Dolby Atmos. (Here's the list of services that do , however.)